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Rep. Lee Issues Statement on Hurricane Recovery Efforts

Targeted News Service

HOUSTON, Texas, Sept. 14 -- Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, a senior member of the House Judiciary, Homeland Security and the Budget Committees, and the ranking member of the House Judiciary subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations, issued the following statement discussing ongoing hurricane relief efforts following the 2017 hurricane season and recovery efforts during the 2018 season:

"The 2017 hurricane season was among the deadliest ever. From San Antonio to St. Croix to San Juan, the destruction left in the wake of a trio of calamitous storms--Harvey, Irma and Maria--has been unimaginable. When Harvey struck my hometown, my fellow Houstonians awoke to a day that would bring them Hurricane Harvey, a monstrous weather event that twice made landfall and which dropped 30 trillion gallons of water and caused $200 billion dollars of damage. The severity of the damage cannot be overstated. Over 100 people died either directly or indirectly because of collateral consequences due to the storm; thousands needed rescue; tens of thousands of homes were damaged and so many, many more lives were affected. After the storm was the recovery, which began the day after the storm first made landfall--the first moment possible. A threshold concern was housing. Harvey damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes in one of the largest metropolitan areas in our nation. Through critical grant programs, many of which were made possible through legislative vehicles part of my congressional advocacy (including $2.4 billion for housing), the act of restoring people's homes was facilitated through grant programs which will train people in the skills attendant to home repair.

"Houston's recovery efforts were also aided by my efforts to redirect $100 million for increased funding for critical construction projects, like those current and future projects proposed for the Houston/Harris County metropolitan area. This was paired with a redirection of $3 million for increased funding for post-disaster watershed assessment studies, like the one that is being contemplated for the Houston/Harris County metropolitan area. I am pleased that legislation I worked to pass earlier this year provides that the Secretary of the Army may initiate up to six new study starts during fiscal year 2019, and that five of those studies are to involve locales that are the subject of a federal disaster declaration issued in 2017 or 2018.

"While Houston has been undergoing its long march to recovery, our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands still experience a fitful recovery effort. The nation's reckoning with the 2017 hurricane season continues, even as this year's hurricane season is well under way. A necessary, yet macabre, task of this effort is coming to terms with the true number of lives lost in Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. From the outset, the official tally that only 64 lives were lost seemed low, and appeared more as an effort to provide cover for the claim that this president and his administration responded flawlessly.

"A report from earlier this year, promulgated by academicians and policy experts at the George Washington University, indicating that the mortality rate in Puerto Rico skyrocketed after Hurricane Maria, lends to the claim that the consequences of this storm were far deadlier than once thought. Indeed, this was not a simple error of the count. This report indicating that the six months following Maria led to an additional 2,975 deaths is appalling, and all the more so with the knowledge that this has occurred to American citizens on American soil. Troubling still is that the concern about an undercounted registrar of fatalities was apparent in the immediate aftermath of the storm, but dismissed by a president who was eager to prove that his management of this calamity surpassed that of his predecessors, when in fact it is undoubtedly the most incompetent response to a natural disaster, ever. All told, the president's mismanagement of and response to this crisis revealed a wholesale incompetence, the results of which were sad, an affront to human dignity, and cost the lives of thousands of American citizens. As a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Federal Emergency Management Agency, I call on our chairman to hold congressional hearings into the administration's response to this human tragedy.

"And, just yesterday, this president managed to merge two ugly episodes of his presidency--his botched recovery to last year's hurricanes, and his amoral child separation policy, which he pursued earlier this Summer. It is outrageous and immoral that the Trump Administration has diverted money away from disaster relief and to the Immigration and Customs Agency ("ICE") to build detention centers to imprison immigrant children forcibly separated from their parents. It is all the more contemptible that news of the diversion comes during the heart of the 2018 hurricane season and as Hurricane Florence barrels towards the Carolinas. The news also comes as the President has renewed his false assertion that his administration's response to last year's devastating Hurricane Maria was perfect, when in actuality the Administration's inertia and incompetence caused close to 3,000 deaths and parts of Puerto Rico are still recovering from the calamity.

"All Americans should be offended by the diversion of these funds from helping vulnerable Americans--those recovering from the immediacy of a natural disaster--towards building cages to hold children separated from their parents. I call upon the President to rescind this decision and call on the congressional leadership to conduct oversight of a president who, by the day, appears unequipped to perform the most rudimentary aspects of the office to which he assented by virtue of the Electoral College. It is sad that the President failed his obligation to help the people of Puerto Rico and has compounded this neglect with indifference. There must be major sustained efforts to help the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and my neighbors dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. We must continue this endeavor with the solemnity of Puerto Rico's revised death toll demands and the purpose and bipartisanship the moment requires and that the American people expect."